I've been a fan of Cisneros for awhile, and had wanted to read this book since I heard about it.

The House on Mango Street is about a young girl, Esperanza, growing up in Chicago. Told in a series of vignettes, we see Esperanza tell us frankly about bright and dark sides of poverty from the perspective of an adolescent. She tells us stories about her neighbors, those always moving in and out (including her own family that moved around), piecing together the stories of her street, her home that she would someday move far away from.

Cisneros's imagery is beautiful, and she speaks the voice of a child in a way that you know she remembers actually being a child/teen. Some of her descriptions were so unique yet so spot on that they caught in my throat. The vignettes worked well in Esperanza's character development (and the way teens tend to flit from idea to idea in the first place) as well as telling mere pieces of a much larger story that we are left to guess at in many respects. But that's the beauty of it. She tells us what we need to know, and we are left to draw our own conclusions.